Archive for the ‘Blog Tools’

Blogging takes time. Sure, you can pump out a short post in a few minutes, but that’s not the norm. Typically, it takes work to put in links, add nice (and non-copyrighted!) photos, and quote someone else. It just takes work. Zemanta is a new service that allows you to do all of that!

The photo search feature allows you to search on keywords from various stock photo providers like Wikimedia and Flickr . You can also recommend your posts to others who use the service, though you will need the FF extension to do that. Basically, the service allows you to do more of what you started blogging for: writing. It will give proper attribution for links, quotes, and pics. Pretty neat service. And it works with blogger, WordPress (hosted and non), Typepad, LiveJournal, MovableType. And it has plugins for IE and FF.

A quick note today to let you all in on a great resource over at SEO Book right now. And even better, it is totally free. Aaron Wall has just released The Blogger’s Guide to SEO and it has loads of valuable information for bloggers that are looking to attract more traffic from search engines.

There are different ways to engage current and future readers of your blog. As usual, you need to give people what they want – what they need. Solve problems and give people information in a way that grabs them, and you’re well on your way to gaining readership. But there are other ways to yank at the net’s pulse. Heartbeat blogging is a term that I use to describe blogging on trend issues. Those trends can be extremely short term like American Idol’s latest vote results or it can longer term like the fuel cost increases. A mixture of these work well.

Google has recently upgraded their trends service to show you the top 100 search terms of the day. You can switch days too to find past hot topics. Yahoo Buzz is another site that is great for seeing what people are clicking. Alexa Movers also gives you a good snapshoot of what’s in. Technorati also has its popular page for seeing what is shaking. There are others – and feel free to share them here – but this is a good start.

Tapping into the zeitgeist is a great way to garner new readers and also pique the interest of old ones. Give it a whirl and see what it does for you.

One of the hottest trends in the blogosphere over the past year plus has been the rise of weblogs focusing on the topic of blogging itself. Some are simply amazing. Here are a few of our favorite blogs about blogging around the internet. Check them out, they are all great resources.

Many bloggers that use Feedburner for their RSS reader statistics had a pleasant surprise over the weekend. A spike in readers! Many didnt know why and probably patted themselves on the back a few times thinking that people had finally wised up and subscribed to their feeds. Turns out Google Reader and Feedburner are working together again. For some time you couldnt see the Google Reader subscribers when looking at your overall feed stats from Feedburner.

Despite that very interesting acronym, it does not in fact stand for what you may be thinking. Instead of What the F**K, Technorati’s latest creation actually stands for “Wheres the Fire” and is already being labeled a Digg clone by some.

Technorati is already known as a staple in the blogging community, and tracks millions of blogs already. The tagging feature of Technorati is one that many use as well, and in my opinion is the best thing Technorati has going for it at this point. They launched WTF just a couple days ago, and I guess it wasnt quite ready since it was taken down and worked on a bit not long after. Its been re-unvieled since and the more we look at it, the more it does seem like a Digg clone.
Technorati allows users to submit stories to the WTF section of thier site, other users can then vote for the stories that they determine to be “on fire” or most popular and those stories are bumped to the front page. Yeah, Digg kinda has that going already…

We actually just gave it a test run with an article from Paul Tech, one of our blogs, and well, its almost a carbon copy of the Digg experience, but Im guessing without the traffic benefits. Time will tell and Ill report back on the experiment.

Here at the Content Quake Network we are big fans of the bloggers that have paved the way for us. Writers that have written about the hows and whys of having a successful blog and sharing that information with the masses. Here are my Top 5 reads from Bloggers whos main topic is the Blogosphere and what is going on within it.

The founders of Review Me have opened up their services to bloggers and advertisers. Ive jumped in to test things out and see what its all about, here is my initial review.

The premise -

First of all, the premise of Review Me is to connect bloggers and advertisers, much in the same way Pay Per Post has done. But, one of the main differences between the services is full blogger disclosure.

What do bloggers need to do?

For bloggers, its rather simple. You sign up and provide your information, this info includes your SSN as you are becoming a 1099 member of the Review Me family when you agree to the terms. Once your account is set up, you add your blog. You can add up to 6 blogs and review as many things as you like it appears.

Once you add a blog a price is assigned based on a combination of your Alexa rank, your Technorati rank, and estimated number of RSS subscribers. You are then also assigned a star rating, between 1-5.

That post title is just one of the amazing statistics to be had over at Dave Sifry’s blog. If you arent aware, Dave is the founder and CEO of Technorati, which is now tracking 57 million blogs. Traditional media outlets still makes up a large section of the main sources for news, but its changing slowly. Here are a few other astounding stats from the report that jumped off the page to me.